Blog Comments & Posts

The days when press releases were written for the sole purpose of pitching a story to a news editor are over. The consumer may also read the press release at places such as Google News, Digg, and Technorati. There are many more places to submit your press release today and more people are reading.

There have been a few mentions on SEOmoz regarding online reputation management and public relations. Rand discussed how to remove a page from Google and RZ Awhyles brought up the simple fact that sometimes, you just need to apologize directly. But neither talked about ways to discourage negative feedback being distributed online in the first place. Taking measures to prevent reputation damage and negative PR is always better than trying to recover from a less than positive review or statement.

I'm not trying to imply that links from the press releases are valuable. It's links you recieve from having others pick up the press release and running a story on it that's particularly valuable. News sites are usually authority sites.

Of course the amount of influcence your organization has in it's market will make a difference as to how effective the PR campaign as a whole is press releases included. But a company of any size can achieve news coverage if it has good enough news.

After reading this I've decided to adopt 301 into my everyday language...

It's going to be sweet to tell my friends back home "I 301'd to Missiouri". Or at the dance club you might hear "I like the way she 301s" or in the aisle of a store... "excuse me sir, but could you 302 over there"

The simple fact that ask has built itself around answering questions through algorithms (well originally real people behind the scene) and yahoo is being so successful with Yahoo Answers would make the perfect combination.

Microsoft still doesn't have search down right. To put a great search engine like Ask with an often irrelevant search engine in like Live, would be a failure. Yahoo has a decent market share, and Ask has some unique technologies. It's they only way to keep Google from totally dominating.
edited 2009-03-12 09:20:39

Because you have a user-driven community, I don't see any problem at all with ads. Like others here I agree, that your users, given the choice between a subscription fee and advertisements, would likely prefer advertisements. There are exceptions to the rule, as in subscription based sites, but looking at your website I'd say it's probably better to go the advertiser route.

The only time I'd avoid ads is when the website is primarily a business and doesn't contain many social aspects, because it appears more professional if you are conducting e-commerce to not include ads.

Oops I think I left a "not" off my post. Let me try that paragraph over the way it was intended.

If you're suggesting that users should NOT get a point for each comment they make within a post, I must disagree. If two users are engaged in a productive discussion, each comment is likely deserving of value. Allowing individual comments to be given thumbs up or thumbs down, permits users to vote on each specific comment. A user could make multiple comments, some might be deserving of being thumbed up and others need to be thumbed down.

Sorry for the confusion. But I'll thumb you up even though we disagree, to make the exchange fair. haha.

SEOmoz already limits each comment to be give 1 thumb up or 1 thumb down per a user.

If you're suggesting that users should get a point for each comment they make within a post, I must disagree. If two users are engaged in a productive discussion, each comment is likely deserving of value. Allowing individual comments to be given thumbs up or thumbs down, permits users to vote on each specific comment. A user could make multiple comments, some might be deserving of being thumbed up and others need to be thumbed down.

A simple solution to the problem you speak of, where comment posters get more credit than the author of a post would be to simply weight the post higher than the comments.

For example a thumbs up on a post could be three points, but a thumbs up on a comment would remain just one point.

But I'm not sure this is necessary, because there are going to be incidents where the comments are deserving of the same (if not more) respect as the post. For example if they give excellent examples or evidence to either prove the point of the post or to dispute it.

I disagree that SEOmoz (or any other site with a similar voting system) should ever attach a user name to to the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down."

This opens the site up for all kinds of abuse potential and eliminates fair discussion. It could lead to retaliation by an user that was upset because someone thumbed him down or it could result in groups of people mutually agreeing to thumb each other up. Either way, it games the system.

It is not a bad idea for the site administrators to have access to who voted a particular article up or down though, for purposes of detecting these kinds of unfair practices and preventing them from occuring. By the way SEOmoz already does this, which is why you can only thumb each post up or down once.

I hope I've explained why that kind of information needs to stay out of the public, but in the hands of the website admin.

The best defense against abuse is IP monitoring, cookies, and permitting each user only one vote. (so even a mean user can only do a limited amount of damage.

Usually if a poster disagrees with something with reason, he'll post a reply with examples of evidence to state why he feels a particular way.

I've used this for several political campaigns. We were able to target specific demographics, including a specific message for "conservatives" and another for "liberals", by using keywords. And we weren't wasting advertising money targetting those that are too young to vote.

It seemed to work out in every case to build a strong support message to exactly the people we wanted.

I do the same thing with all my clients. My contracts state that client has granted authority to the developer to modify the website, including source code.

With larger coorperations, you may not want to rely upon the whois though, because might never get to talk to the registrant of a domain name. The individuals listed as the administrative or technical contacts in a domain might only be in charge of technical aspects of the site and often times don't have the authority to change of the sites content. This is often the case when a corporation has separate IT and marketing departments.

This tool is excellent for showing you who's linking to a padrticular site and the relative amount of link juice that they are passing. With the anchor text right along side, it gives a better understanding as to why a website might be ranking the way it does.

The primary factor in the sandbox is simply the age of the site. New sites (especially if the content is not frequently updated) will have difficulty ranking for keywords.

If the domain has never been registered or if it was recently dropped, you might experience the sandbox effect.

The rules however are not universal, as some sites seem to avoid the effect all together. It seems to be linked to the difficult of the keyword. More competitive keywords will have a longer sandbox effect for new sites than less competitive words. This helps to keep search engine spam down on common searches.

I'm testing this theory with some newly registered domain names and will happily report back to the SEOmoz community when I have more solid statistics to back up my claim.

But in what I've noticed with clients sites the domain isn't as important as the mentions for getting out of the sandbox. This might largely be due to Google just considering the buzz factor.

So Microsoft (not that they'd ever be sandboxed)... might be seeking mentions of the brand name Microsoft and not just microsoft.com.

Again this is just a theory, but it goes back to brand building:

Obviously, page position is largely determined (arguably the majority) by backlinks. But my theory here is that brand development (along side with links) will get you out of the sandbox faster. I think that both are important in terms of overal internet marketing.

But the key is to build QUALITY backlinks. Backlinks that are low quality and look like search engine spam are not going to help you get out of the sandbox. In fact they may keep you there even longer.

It's beter to spend your time developing quality content that people will want to link to. Rand did a video a while back explaining the difference between good links and bad links, called "Dude, Your Links Kinda Suck". It's a good place to start, but I'm sure the more you read here at SEOmoz, the more you'll see the difference.

I think that Brand Name mentions (without links) from a variety of unique domains will get you out of the sand box.

My personal site www.wesupchurch.com (a campaign site), never experienced many of the sandbox effects (even with low quallity link building). I didn't recieve many high quality links to it, but I recieved tons of mentions of my name (or brand if you will). This was because every news paper in the state and every county clerk published a list of candidates.

I think this goes to show that google IS paying more attention to brand names.

I've experienced this with several client sites as well, some in the movie industry (getting mentions about their releases) and others in the political field.

But many sites where I've done massive manual link building, are still sandboxed.

But all of the sites I've noticed this on were Joomla based sites hosted on Godaddy servers. If you don't believe me try it... they are always indexed by Google, even before any incoming links exist.

I don't know if this is because of something in the Joomla core or if it is something that Godaddy has integrated into their server software (like the Google Webmaster Tools). But I've noticed it under several user accounts and on several websites.

I speculate that a sitemap or rss feed must exist somewhere. That or Google is checking on domain name registrations (in which case this isn't a phenomena limited to a specific registrar or CMS system)...

I think that because this blog audience consists of mostly of SEO professionals and because this blog is the authority on the subject... some interesting things occur:

As SEO professionals themselves, the members save their really good SEO content for their own sites.

Most members are here to learn from SEOmoz and become better professionals. Recognizing SEOmoz as the authority, they don't challenge it positions often (because SEOmoz is ALWAYS accurate of course).

I'd venture to say that most professional members are paying to improve their own understand of SEO. So they want to read the content on SEOmoz. That doesn't automatically mean they to contribute to it.

People don't want to look like the new guy or be called out in front of the rest of the professional community.

To get people involved...

Motivate them! Offer more rewards and reasons to get involve.

Empower them! Provide the users with more feedback.

Appreciate them! Make users feel like they are part of a family, more so than a professional association.

By the way I think SEOmoz is great at doing all these things, but there's always room for improvement.